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£9.2bn released from schemes using pension freedoms.
More than 1.5 million payments were made in the three months to December 2016, using the flexible pension freedoms. Some 162,000 people accessed £1.56bn flexibly from their pension savings according to HMRC . Since the regime was introduced in April 2015, £9.2bn has been released from pension schemes.
Gareth James, pension expert at AJ Bell, said: ‘While it is good to see that the pension freedoms are being used by a large number of people, it is dangerous to use the £9.2bn as a measure of success when it doesn’t tell us what people are doing with that money. Are they using it to provide a regular and sustainable income as pensions are designed to do or are they spending it too quickly and likely to run out of money too quickly?’
